InfoPath Dev

This seems to be a strange case.

If you do a preview do you only see one or do you get two?

This is probably more likely an IE or printer issue but tricky to troubleshoot and narrow down the cases where it happens.

When I do a print preview, I only see one page.  Although, during a print preview, it says 1 of 2 pages, and when you page down, the 2nd page is blank.  It's only when it's sent to the printer do you actually get 2 pages.  I've tested this on different brand printers, same issue.  I've had our vendor for Microsoft products try it at their company with the same result.  I've found another company out in the GOOGLE Groups that is also having the same issue.  This will soon become a big problem at our company as we are heading toward Office 2007 next week.

So the second page is blank?

Have you tested it in InfoPath client rather than the browser to see if it happens the same?

My guess would be that the form is either wider than a paper width or longer.

Do you use a specific view for printing?

I would check in designer to see if some layout table or something is wider than what actually shows.  In designer can you scroll to the right while looking at the form.  I have found this can get pushed out and then does not shrink back unless you drag it back.

The 2nd page is only blank in the print preview.  When you print, you get 2 printed pages of the same thing.  The form is really less than a page long.  I have not tested it in InfoPath client as we do not use that, we only use browser forms that are sent as emials.  We do switch to a print view before sending the email.  We've checked the form in designer, our vendor has checked the form in designer, actually rebuilt the form from scratch, and still, the same issue.  A couple of other notes to this problem....1.) if the recipient responds to or forwards the email of the form,  the new recipient can print the form with do duplication problem; 2.)  if the recipient has Outlook 2003, no duplicate print problems.  

Is the view in the body of the email?

Or is it just an attachment?

The view is in the body of the email

So there is no attachment?

I was thinking it may be printing both.

This may be an issue in how Outlook 2007 prints web content, since you say 2003, is not a problem.

no attachment....I wish it was that easy.  We know it's something with Outlook 2007 rendering and have opened a ticket with Microsoft.  I was just hoping to find a resolution sooner. 

We have the same double printing problem at my institution (In our case, the email client is Outlook 2003). I also have several other complaints regarding bugs in the browser forms. This implementation does not seem to have gone through a lot of user-testing (in fact, it seems to not have gone through user-testing at all).

I'm submitting a ticket to Microsoft today regarding this issue, and a few minor ones.  What other problems are you having ?  The 2-page issue is really our only big problem.  We were kind of forced into a hurried implementation due to the fact that the old Outlook Forms can no longer be printed once you go to Outlook 2007. 

There are three major ones.

The first problem:

InfoPath tries to assist the user when completing forms by popping up little boxes containing messages on the requirements for each field (controls like text boxes etc.).

Unfortunately the browser will more often than not place these boxes over the fields the user is trying to fill in (this is due to the way the MS scripts reacts to the onMouse events). Because a field needs to receive focus before you can fill it in, you either have to tab to the particular field, or you have to click on it. If the popup is in the way however (when using the mouse), the field cannot receive focus and therefore you cannot fill it in. This forces the user to move the mouse around in an attempt to get a clear shot at the field (the popup tries to follow the mouse pointer and sometimes ends up sitting right in front of the field you want to fill in).

Maybe I just haven't played enough with InfoPath, but this is what happens by default when you add rules to the controls. If MS had given more attention to the way they handle events, this could have been avoided. In the meantime I have to space the controls apart to such an extent that the popups won't affect the users.

The second problem:

You cannot use spaces in a multi-line textbox. The form crashes out and you get a really funky error message in your application log: "Exception Message: Reference to undeclared entity 'nbsp'"

How could they have missed this? Their workaround of course can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931426

They suggest that you replace all these multi-line text boxes with Rich text boxes. So now a visitor can type in his Postal address in multiple fonds and colors (maybe this can be switched of to some extend but I don't see this as an acceptable solution and the problem should not have existed in the first place).

 The third problem:

You can not submit a browser form as an anonymous user if it is configured to save the results into a list. (You can, but you will have to jump through several fiery hoops, and then fly around the moon twice)

As far as I know, MOSS has replaced their CMS product and in that regard they are touting it as one of the best solutions for an Internet facing website (they actually used the words "the best" when they sold it to us) but it cannot even handle this simple task unless you downgrade the form to "email only" (I heard that this hasn't been fixed in SP1)

The "MS Gold partner" that is providing all the development and support for our SPS sites are currently testing SP1 so I don't know if it will resolve problems 1 and 2 (or even the printing problem) but we are hopeful.

Problem 3 is a major concern of ours as we were counting on this type of functionality. The Gold partner told us for more than a year that you could not submit InfoPath browser forms unless you were authenticated. It was only after I started working with the system that I realized we could at least do email submissions.

Hey Hexium.

Thanks for the post and information.  I am just starting to delve into browser based forms.

As far as the validation popups, can that be controlled in the control properties and postback settings?  Obviously the standard validation could be turned off and you could perform your own validation checks.

As far as anonymous submits, we have been able to sidestep this by submitting forms to SQL rather then SharePoint directly and then they can be seen in SharePoint via a webpart as usual.

Send me an email if you would like to discuss.

Thanks for the reply. Initially I did look into the different ways people have tried to support anonymous posts. I can remember reading about creating web-services and having forms post to them (possibly the same solution as yours with the web-services saving received data to a DB)

Unfortunately I am unable to spend a lot of time on SharePoint as we still do a lot of development in another environment (this will undoubtedly change and my institution is already putting more focus on SP because of its Knowledge Management capabilities). My problem with the InfoPath product is that it should enable non-technical users to publish their own forms and I cannot foresee them creating web-services or placing custom code directly into their forms. That said the product does exhibit a lot of potential.

Another critical problem I have found (but forgot to mention):

I am told by collogues that InfoPath sometimes complain that the document you are trying to open is no longer in the directory it was created in, and then refuses to open that document. This happens when they have to work on InfoPath forms that other users created. InfoPath also does a similar thing when the domain of a SharePoint server changes (you can also not submit the forms in the latter or open them using InfoPath)

I have tried to unzip one of these files to correct the data by hand (it is only XML after-all) but when I zipped it again, InfoPath just rejected the document claiming that it was corrupt. I then tried to just unzip and zip again without making any changes as I couldn’t understand why it would complain – same results. Do you know how I can safely attempt such an operation? (I thought that a possible cause might be the type of compression used by WinZip/7Zip but so far all my attempts with different settings and algorithms have failed)

One of the great things about InfoPath is that it does allow the non-techincal to bridge the gap and create their own forms.  Obviously there is some learning but to me if they can master Excel they can make the jump to InfoPath.  If you are using soley browser based forms then that is additional complexity but even still should be doable, especially if they are managing or updating existing forms.

The web services setup very easily and do not require code or anything, InfoPath does all of the setup.  Have you used the built in Rules and Actions?  A lot of developers start out just coding in InfoPath but probably 95% of solutions can be accomplished without any code and just using the capabilities in the UI.

There is a tool on http://www.qdabra.com which allows you to migrate tamplates and their documents from one site to the other.  You can break the cab open and edit and repackage but you have to know all the tricks.  The little tool there was built to solve the issue.